I like thinking of the cultural differences between Wizards and Muggles. Small things.
Where do people tend to get callouses on their hands...?
Differences in how Muggles and Wizards construct things...
How Muggles and Wizards perceive skill, in general.
I'd love to do a meta on this lol but for now its HC
(mainly just me getting excited and putting down my own HC to text)
For Muggles - we like to see complexity. Things fitting together in little perfect pieces: engines and electronics.
Fast, precise finger movements from years of practice.
Clever simplicity... the perfect fit of a dovetail joint, the perfect angle of curve for an arch to bear weight... we love that shit.
Wizards... don't seem to care for such things. They are more impressed by invisibility, hidden power, and sheer absurdity.
You don't 'get good' at peeling vegetables. The vegetables peel themselves with your intent.
An ugly chair with joints magicked together, wood sticking to wood, is more impressive than something hand-carved.
They get a car, or a motorcycle, and the first thing they want to do to it is make it do impossible stuff - without fanfare.
The way we see magic being used... seems to be that the more simple the casting appears - the more impressive.
You learn a spell with a specific wand movement, an incantation - and it works. But masters can cast without saying anything, with just a flick of their wand - or even more impressive, only their hand.
This comes back to the 'basic every-day tasks' thing:
If all that HC is true - then things we think of as simple, like... twist lids, or pull-tags on cans - they're actually quite complex.
You need a different hand-motion and muscle use to open each.
Muggles are very good at that. Everything we interact with is, in some way, a little puzzle box. I think this is why Wizards are considered not as good at 'logic' or whatever:
Everything Muggles do is 'wooden block in square hole' type shit.
Wizards just magic the wooden block in however they want!
If they, say, typically seal bottles with a cork and a spell, opened with a flick of the wand or sheer mental intent - what WOULD they do with a jar? Or a sharp-edged bottlecap? It'd be like giving it to a toddler.
While the movie line of 'what is the function of a rubber duck?' is a little silly... it is a strange object:
It has a weird, porous 'plug' or 'lid' underneath you can't open?
It has enough resistance to make you think it isn't meant to be squeezed - but if you do, it makes a squawking raspy noise.
...Why? That is a lot of confusing elements.
Wizards would make a bath toy duck waddle around, hatch eggs - and then fall to pieces into yellow bubbles that quack when they pop.
It will just work, without effort other than it's initial creation.
The act of needing to pick up and squeeze a toy, for a noise... easy, in isolation, but doing that sort of stuff all day all the time would be exhausting. You need to twist EVERY doorknob?!?
Molly struggling to do housework 'the muggle way'?
Countless little tools that need lots of different body movements?
Absolutely difficult. Ron struggles with it. It's used as punishment.
I think Wizards, in general, would lack practiced fine motor control that isn't wand-based - and it gets worse with age.
Plus a lack of practice with problems with physics as solutions.
Sirius likes puzzles - and he swam across an ocean. I don't see him having physical or conceptual problems with a jar lid...
But, if he had never seen a twist lid like that before, it might throw him (or anyone) for a loop. He'd tilt it around, see that there are teeth in the glass hooking into the metal lid, so it won't lift off...
But he might twist it and find resistance. It's not just working.
So... that's not the solution, surely? He can't break it, that'd be losing the puzzle. But if it is resisting then its wrong. Hm...
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